Oregon redistricting: Part One

Oregon Democrats flubbed partisan redistricting.

Oregon now has two GOP Members of Congress, and Democrats lost their supermajorities in the state legislature.

Oregon has a surplus of Democrats and if Oregon were as aggressive at partisan redistricting as are Florida, Texas, and North Carolina, then by "packing and cracking," Oregon Democrats could have assured themselves five of the six congressional districts and supermajorities in both the state House and Senate. Instead, the November election resulted in a near-equal balance of Republican and Democratic winners, one that generally reflects the un-gerrymandered partisan skew of the state's voters.

The partisan lean of districts was a powerful predictor of election outcome. Republicans vote for Republicans; Democrats vote for Democrats. Case in point: Oregon's moderate Democratic U.S. Senator Ron Wyden had token opposition by Republican Jo Rey Perkins, a Q-Anon supporter but otherwise unknown, with an invisible, unfunded campaign. All she had going for her was that she was on the ballot as a Republican. Voters in my home county of Jackson voted 51-46 in her favor, reflecting the partisan skew of the county. Candidate quality--or the lack of a campaign--had little effect.

Tam Moore: early 1970s

Veteran Oregon journalist Tam Moore gives a closer look at the Oregon redistricting process. Moore had been a Jackson County commissioner back in the mid-1970s, but his professional life has been as a television and print journalist for six decades so far. 

Guest Post by Tam Moore

There may be some lessons learned from Oregon’s November 8 mid-term election. It was the first conducted with new congressional and legislative districts based on a highly-partisan process and the Federal 2020 Census. The top statewide race, for governor, was contested by three experienced legislators, two of whom were at odds in the 2021 regular and special sessions of the Oregon Legislature.

But the headline issue of that special session on redistricting, held in September 2021, didn’t see the light of day in a campaign run a year later.

For readers of this blog from out of state, Oregonians were treated to – or suffered through-- a $70 million gubernatorial contest. Much of that money went to video attack ads. TV screens danced with dark images of either the Democratic or Republican candidate. Not a positive for a progressive state or trust in government.

Election results in Oregon won’t be final until December 13, but with a 65.5 % voter turnout and all but a handful of ballots tallied, Democrat Tina Kotek won the governorship with 915,302 votes, defeating Republican Christine Drazan, with 848,105 votes, and Independent Betsy Johnson with 168,091.

Kotek was speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives from 2013 through 2022. Drazan was House Minority Leader from 2019 through 2021. Johnson, a state senator for 16 years, was a conservative Democrat who canceled her party registration and mounted a well-financed campaign as an independent candidate.

To understand Oregon politics, particularly since 2016 when a “motor voter” law began signing up folks as they got a driver’s license, it’s good to look at current voter registration, and to remember that for whatever reason Oregon Democrats dominate in urban areas and Republicans are more numerous in rural and downstate counties. These data are from Secretary of State records current as of the November election.

Oregon voter registration, November 2022, Statewide:

Democrat 1,021,755
Republican  737,535
Non-affiliated & minor parties  1,244,335

That urban-leaning Democratic edge is stark when you look at the counties where Kotek had the plurality: Seven of Oregon’s 36 counties. All of those counties are within coverage areas of the state’s two largest television markets—Portland and Eugene.

Urban-Rural partisan split

That same rural-urban tilt was in play in 2019 and 2020, when minority Republicans left the state in the midst of a legislative session to deny majority Democrats the constitutional quorum needed to do business.

Partisan acrimony carried over to 2021, when redistricting was on the plate for a special September session. That spring, House Republicans, led by Drazan, slowed the regular-session legislative process to a snail’s pace by demanding that bills be read in their entirety before the Democratic majority could vote to approve the measure. Kotek and Drazen made a much-publicized deal: The Rs would stop demanding a full reading in exchange for Kotek appointing a Redistricting Committee evenly spilt with three Rs and three Ds.

But facing a court-ordered deadline to draw those maps, the House came to the Redistricting Special Session in late September 2021 without the Redistricting Committee as a whole offering a single proposed map for the six congressional districts to which Oregon is entitled as a result of the 2020 census. Staff had set the table for citizens and legislators to draw district boundaries. Software accessible on the Legislature’s web site let one play with boundaries and see both how close they came to balancing census population, and more important for politicians, how many registered voters by party affiliation (or non-affiliation) would result for the proposed district.

Insiders hoped the evenly-balanced committee would craft perhaps a half-dozen options. Expanding Oregon to six districts from five gave a chance to redraw boundaries – all based on the new census data. The census counts people, not registered voters. The committee met off and on for six weeks leading up to the special session. The day Kotek scrapped the deal, Danny Moran, her spokesperson, told the Statesman-Journal the Republicans violated the "spirit" of the deal once it became clear they were not willing to meaningfully contribute to the process of drawing maps.

One week later, the Legislature approved not only the congressional maps but those for state senate and house districts, all passed by the Democratic majorities in both houses. Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Lake Oswego, chaired both new house committees which managed the map-making. Drazen capped the final hour of the special session, offering a motion to censure Kotek for breaking the redistricting deal. Just 47 of the 60 house members were on the floor when the motion came up; all the Democrats present voted “nay,” killing the censure.

The action came just hours before a deadline set by the state Supreme Court; had the Legislature not acted, drawing those maps would have fallen to the Democratic Secretary of State. Instead challenging lawsuits put the congressional maps before a panel of five judges and the state legislative maps before the Supreme Court. Both review panels found the redistricting complied with Oregon law.

During the Senate debate on adopting the congressional map, which anchors four of the six congressional districts in the Portland metropolitan area, Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend denounced “what I call outsized influence. That really speaks to one of the biggest issues we have in the state, which is the urban-rural divide. It is toxic.”

Lesson One – Oregon is a house divided. Unless redistricting laws are changed, the courts tell us gerrymandering is OK. And we can count on partisan legislators to offer a repeat performance after the 2030 Census.

Lesson Two—Political campaigns are driven by polling which shows interests of voters. Voiding the redistricting deal wasn’t on the public’s mind this past summer when campaigns cooked up all those negative ads. Besides that, few folks would probably understand complexities of political maneuvering within the original House Redistricting Committee.

Tomorrow, Part Two: Competitive Congressional Districts.

[Note: To get daily home delivery of this blog go to https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]